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It sounds like the kind of thing you vaguely remember hearing in your parents’ recreation room in the middle of some retroactively insensitive cartoon:

“Ooga chaka, hooga hooga. Ooga chaka, hooga hooga…”

These days, it’s the unforgettably goofy intro to a 40-year-old recording that’s been revived by a blockbuster movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, and its ’70s-laden soundtrack, a.k.a. Awesome Mix, Vol. 1, which is as we speak the No. 1 album in both Canada and the U.S., on both Billboard and iTunes.

Here, then, a look at the origins of “ooga chaka” and what has turned into the song of the summer that no one saw coming:

1. a) Oomba ooga: Often cited as the original inspiration for the Blue Swede version, the “oomba ooga” chant plays a memorable part in “Running Bear,” a 1959 hit sung by Johnny Preston and written by J.P. Richardson, better known as the Big Bopper. While Preston handles the vocals, the chanting is done by Richardson and country legend George Jones.

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Whether the “oomba oogas” in “Running Bear” were really the model for the Blue Swede hit is a matter of contention. Many sites, including the comprehensive songfacts.com, acknowledge that the Blue Swede version is actually a copy, and go on to state a variation of this sentence: “The first use of the chant in this song, however, was in the 1971 version by the English singer and pop mogul Jonathan King, who added the ‘Oooonga Chackas,’ which were based on the chant in Johnny Preston’s 1959 hit ‘Running Bear.’ ”

I put this claim to King this week on an online message board on his website, and he was quick to reply. “Nope, not inspired by any other record. Just wanted different instruments to make a reggae rhythm and decided on male voices.” (Reggae? More on that later.)

1. b)Egga hooga: One of the better covers of “Running Bear” was done by The Guess Who. Their version graced 1972’s Rockin’ (where it was mistakenly credited to Curley Herdman, a Virginia fiddler who did write a song called “Running Bear,” but it was a totally different song, and this is probably too much information, isn’t it?) On their version, the chant more closely resembles “egga hooga,” at least before it all dissolves into (even more) gibberish at the end.

2. Pre-ooga: The original, non-ooga “Hooked on a Feeling” was written by Mark James, best known for penning “Suspicious Minds.” He even recorded his own version of that song, which Elvis Presley covered in almost identical fashion.

Released by B.J. Thomas in 1968, “Hooked on a Feeling” featured a distinctive sitar opening and made the top 5.

Given that the song was written for a woman he went on to marry (and to whom he’s still married), how did James react when first heard those ooga-chakas? “This is a fun record and it’s well-made. It’s a hit,” is what he recalls telling record executives, in an interview with Spin.com. “I said, ‘How big is this? I don’t know, but I’d buy it.’”

3. Ooga chagga: That’s how Jonathan King renders the chant, which, if you remember, he says he came up with in his pursuit of a “reggae rhythm.”

That may have been because he cut the track on the same night as a novelty song called “Johnny Reggae,” which went on to become a sizable hit in the U.K. in 1971. Credited to the Piglets — three female session singers in their 30s or 40s whom King instructed to sing like 15-year-olds — “Johnny Reggae” at least sounded marginally connected to the genre in the title.

He characterized the ooga chagga intro to his “Hooked on a Feeling” much more accurately in his 2009 autobiography, 65 My Life So Far: “Six guys grunting like gorillas.”

Lately, he writes on his website, “I’ve had so many E-mail requests asking about the Ooga Chagga chant that I’m devoting a chapter to the explanation in my new book.”

4. Ooga chaka: Which brings us to a singer named Bjorn Skifs and his band, Blue Swede, or Blåblus, as they were known in their homeland.

“Yes, Bjorn Skifs kindly called me to say he wanted to cover my version and did I mind?” Jonathan King recently recalled online. “I said no — go ahead (mine had been released years earlier and was a big hit in many countries). Then America picked up on his photocopy (better label) and whoosh! You can’t win them all.”

Even back in 2005, in an interview with fan site World of Genesis (King produced that band’s first album), he was saying of Blue Swede’s version, “I felt theirs added nothing to my original. I’d have liked to have made some money out of my ‘ooga chagga’ concept, but that’s life and copyright laws. You can’t copyright an arrangement!”

Apart from the ooga chakas, there’s one other wrinkle to Blue Swede’s recording. They tweaked the lyrics to get around what was, at the time, a crackdown on anything that could be even remotely construed as a drug reference. While both Thomas’s and King’s version included lines like “I got it bad for you, babe” and “I’ll just stay addicted,” Blue Swede’s version changed those to “I got a bug for you, girl” and “I just stay a victim.”

5. Post-ooga: Long before Guardians of the Galaxy, Blue Swede and its ooga chakas had managed to remain an intermittent presence in pop culture through sampling and soundtracks.

Along with memorable appearances in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and on the so-called “dancing baby” episode of TV’s Ally McBeal (1998), “Hooked on a Feeling” has been covered by everyone from big-in-Germany David Hasselhoff to big-in-Denmark dance band Party Animals.

It has also been sampled by, among others, trail-blazing hip-hop act The Jungle Brothers, on 1989’s “Good Newz Coming” from the classic Done By the Forces of Nature; The Offspring, on 2000’s “Special Delivery”; the Warehouse Party Boys on their hyperactive “The Warehouse Acid Groove”; and DJ Delirium, who employs a slo-mo snippet in the hardcore “The Feeling.”

The vinyl countdown: Speaking of Guardians of the Galaxy, its soundtrack, Awesome Mix, Vol. 1 is belatedly coming out on vinyl, paired with Tyler Bates’s score as a limited-edition two-LP set. It’s out Sept. 2.

A week earlier (Aug. 26) and a decade later (the ’80s), four prime catalogue titles will return to vinyl: ABC’s 1982 debut, The Lexicon of Love (the one with “The Look of Love”); Dexys Midnight Runners’ 1982 sophomore album, Too Rye Aye (the one with “Come On Eileen”); Soft Cell’s 1981 debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (the one with “Tainted Love”); and Tears For Fears’ 1983 debut, The Hurting (the one with “Mad World”).

None comes with bonus tracks, but each has been remastered and pressed on 180-gram vinyl.

Finally, two long-out-of-print titles by Jimi Hendrix are returning to vinyl (and CD). His first two posthumous releases, The Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge, will be out in Canada on Sept. 16. Though much of the material (“Dolly Dagger,” “Hear My Train A Comin’”) has since been mined for other releases, notably First Rays of the New Rising Sun, the two albums have been out of official circulation for the better part of two decades.

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